Excavation teeth are provided on the digging edge of various digging devices such as the buckets of front end loaders. Each excavation tooth is formed of a number of parts, commonly a point, an adapter and a lock. The adapter is typically fitted to the digging device and the point fits over the adapter and is retained in place by the lock. In some instances one or more intermediate parts may be also included between the point and the adapter.
The reason that the excavation tooth is formed of a number of parts is to avoid having to discard the entire tooth when only parts of the tooth, in particular the ground engaging part of the tooth (i.e. the point) is worn or broken.
On some types of digging devices, shrouds are also attached to the digging lip of the device to protect the digging lip edge from wear. Once worn, the shrouds can be removed and discarded and a new replacement shroud attached. This reduces the need to replace the whole device if the lip edge became worn, which would be much more costly than replacing just the shrouds. The shrouds typically comprise a wear member that fits around a portion of the lip edge and a mechanical locking device for locking the wear member to the lip, but which also allows the wear member to be removed once worn. The shrouds may be disposed along the entire length of the lip edge or be disposed between excavation teeth that are attached to the lip.
Various types of shrouds and excavation teeth and their component parts are known. However, it is always desirable to design new shrouds, excavation teeth and parts thereof. Throughout this specification, the term “wear assembly” is intended to include shrouds and excavation teeth and “wear members” may include members that form part of shrouds or excavation teeth.